Cayuga County
Auburn on the Owasco outlet, the Cayuga villages along the lake, and the crossing of the Cayuga outlet on the Central Trail.
The Cayuga (Gwe-u-gweh-o-no-ga on the sheet) lived along the east shore of their lake, and the 1851 map strings villages down that shore from the outlet to Aurora. Auburn appears as Dwas-co on the Owasco outlet, where the Central Trail crossed the stream on its way from Skaneateles to the north end of Cayuga Lake.
The trail crossed the Cayuga outlet and the marsh near the lake’s north end, the crossing later bridged by the mile-long Cayuga Bridge of 1800 and today by NY-5/US-20. Owasco Lake (Owas-co) and Skaneateles Lake frame the county’s south; Cross Lake and the Seneca River its north, with the trail branch to Three Rivers running along the river.
Modern towns on the route: Skaneateles, Auburn, Cayuga, and Union Springs on the lake road (NY-90) south of the trail.
Trails through the county
- The Central Trail: Onondaga to Canandaigua — The western half of the Iroquois Trail across the Finger Lakes: Marcellus, Skaneateles, Auburn, the Cayuga crossing, Seneca Falls, Geneva and Canandaigua.
Sources
- Morgan & Parker, Map of Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (1851), digitized by Yale Beinecke Library
- Russell's 1962 redraw, Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library
- W. M. Beauchamp, Perch Lake Mounds, with notes on other New York mounds and some accounts of Indian trails, NYS Museum Bulletin 87 (1905)